Part 33
By far the finest of the buildings, however, is the famous university, which occupies the larger part of the southern frontage of the town. The present establishment only dates from 1818, and owes its existence to King Frederick William III. of Prussia; but as early as 1786 the academy which had been founded about nine years before was raised by Archbishop Maximilian Frederick of Cologne to the rank of a university, and continued to exercise its functions till 1794, when it was dissolved by the last elector. The building now occupied by the university was originally the electoral palace, constructed about 1717 out of the materials of the old fortifications. It was remodelled after the town came into Prussian possession. There are five faculties in the university--a legal, a medical, and a philosophic, and one of Roman Catholic and another Protestant theology. The library numbers upwards of 230,000 volumes; and the antiquarian museum contains a valuable collection of Roman relics discovered in the neighbourhood. Connected with the university are also physiological, pathological and chemical institutes, five clinical departments and a laboratory. An academy of agriculture, with a natural history museum and botanic garden attached, is established in the palace of Clemensruhe at Poppelsdorf, which is reached by a fine avenue about a mile long, bordered on both sides by a double row of chestnut trees. A splendid observatory, long under the charge of Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, stands on the south side of the road. The Roman Catholic archiepiscopal theological college, beautifully situated on an eminence overlooking the Rhine, dates from 1892.
Beethoven was born in Bonn, and a statue was erected to him in the Munster-platz in 1845. B.G. Niebuhr is buried in the cemetery outside of the Sterntor, where a monument was placed to his memory by Frederick William IV. Here are also the tombs of A.W. von Schlegel, the diplomatist Christian Karl von Bunsen, Robert Schumann, Karl Simrock, E.M. Arndt and Schiller's wife. The town is adorned with a marble monument commemorating the war of 1870-71, a handsome fountain, and a statue of the Old Catholic bishop Reinkens. In 1889 a museum of Beethoven relics was opened in the house in which the composer was born. There are further a municipal museum, arranged in a private house since 1882, an academic art museum (1884), with some classic originals, a creation of F.G. Welcker, and the provincial museum, standing near the railway station, which contains a collection of medieval stone monuments and works of art, besides a small picture gallery.
One of the most conspicuous features of Bonn, viewed from the river, is the pilgrimage (monastic) church of Kreuzberg (1627), behind and above Poppelsdorf; it has a flight of 28 steps, which pilgrims used to ascend on their knees. "Der alte Zoll," commanding a magnificent view of the Siebengebirge, is the only remaining bulwark of the old fortifications, the Sterntor having been removed in order to open up better communication with the rapidly increasing western suburbs and the terminus of the light railway to Cologne.
But for its university Bonn would be a place of comparatively little importance, its trade and commerce being of moderate dimensions. Its principal industries are jute spinning and weaving, and the manufacture of porcelain, flags, machinery and beer, and it has some trade in wine. There are considerable numbers of foreign residents, notably English, attracted by the natural beauty of the place and by the educational facilities it affords.
Bonn (_Bonna_ or _Castra Bonnensia_), originally a town of the Ubii, became at an early period the site of a Roman military settlement, and as such is frequently mentioned by Tacitus. It was the scene, in A.D. 70, of a battle in which the Romans were defeated by Claudius Civilis, the valiant leader of the Batavians. Greatly reduced by successive barbarian inroads, it was restored about 359 by the emperor Julian. In the centuries that followed the break-up of the Roman empire it again suffered much from barbarian attacks, and was finally devastated in 889 by bands of Norse raiders who had sailed up the Rhine. It was again fortified by Konrad von Hochstaden, archbishop of Cologne (1238-1261), whose successor, Engelbert von Falkenburg (d. 1274), driven out of his cathedral city by the townspeople, established himself here (1265); from which time until 1794 it remained the residence of the electors of Cologne. During the various wars that devastated Germany in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the town was frequently besieged and occupied by the several belligerents, but continued to belong to the electors till 1794, when the French took possession of it. At the peace of Luneville they were formally recognized in their occupation; but in 1815 the town was made over by the congress of Vienna to Prussia. The fortifications had been dismantled in 1717.
See F. Ritter, _Entstehung der drei altesten Stadte am Rhein: Koln, Bonn und Mainz_ (Bonn, 1851); H. von Sybel, _Die Grundung der Universitat Bonn_ (1868); and _Fuhrer von Hesse_ (10th ed., 1901).
BONNAT, LEON JOSEPH FLORENTIN (1833- ), French painter, was born at Bayonne on the 20th of June 1833. He was educated in Spain, under Madrazo at Madrid, and his long series of portraits shows the influence of Velasquez and the Spanish realists. In 1869 he won a medal of honour at Paris, where he became one of the leading artists of his day, and in 1888 he became professor of painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In May 1905 he succeeded Paul Dubois as director. His vivid portrait-painting is his most characteristic work, but his subject pictures, such as the "Martyrdom of St Denis" in the Pantheon, are also famous.
BONNE-CARRERE, GUILLAUME DE (1754-1825), French diplomatist, was born at Muret in Languedoc on the 13th of February 1754. He began his career in the army, but soon entered the diplomatic service under Vergennes. A friend of Mirabeau and of Dumouriez, he became very active at the Revolution, and Dumouriez re-established for him the title of director-general of the department of foreign affairs (March 1792). He remained at the ministry, preserving the habits of the diplomacy of the old regime, until December 1792, when he was sent to Belgium as agent of the republic, but he was involved in the treason of Dumouriez and was arrested on the 2nd of April 1793. To justify himself, he published an account of his conduct from the beginning of the Revolution. He was freed from prison in July 1794. Napoleon did not trust him, and gave him only some unimportant missions. After 1815 Bonne-Carrere retired into private life, directing a profitable business in public carriages between Paris and Versailles.
BONNER, EDMUND (1500?-1569), bishop of London, was perhaps the natural son of George Savage, rector of Davenham, Cheshire, by Elizabeth Frodsham, who was afterwards married to Edmund Bonner, a sawyer of Hanley in Worcestershire. This account, which was printed with many circumstantial details by Strype (_Eccles. Mem._ III. i. 172-173), was disputed by Strype's contemporary, Sir Edmund Lechmere, who asserted on not very satisfactory evidence (_ib. Annals_, I. ii. 300)that Bonner was of legitimate birth. He was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating bachelor of civil and canon law in June 1519. He was ordained about the same time, and admitted D.C.L. in 1525. In 1529 he was Wolsey's chaplain, and he was with the cardinal at Cawood at the time of his arrest. Subsequently he was transferred, perhaps through Cromwell's influence, to the service of the king, and in January 1532 he was sent to Rome to obstruct the judicial proceedings against Henry in the papal curia. In October 1533 he was entrusted with the unmannerly task of intimating to Clement VII., while he was the guest of Francis I. at Marseilles, Henry's appeal from the pope to a general council; but there seems to be no good authority for Burnet's story that Clement threatened to have him burnt alive. For these and other services Bonner had been rewarded by the grant of several livings, and in 1535 he was made archdeacon of Leicester.
Towards the end of that year he was sent to further what he called "the cause of the Gospel" (_Letters and Papers_, 1536, No. 469) in North Germany; and in 1536 he wrote a preface to Gardiner's _De vera Obedientia_, which asserted the royal, denied the papal, supremacy, and was received with delight by the Lutherans. After a brief embassy to the emperor in the spring of 1538, Bonner superseded Gardiner at Paris, and began his mission by sending Cromwell a long list of accusations against his predecessor (_ib_. 1538, ii. 144). He was almost as bitter against Wyatt and Mason, whom he denounced as a "papist," and the violence of his conduct led Francis I. to threaten him with a hundred strokes of the halberd. He seems, however, to have pleased his patron, Cromwell, and perhaps Henry, by his energy in seeing the king's "Great" Bible in English through the press in Paris. He was already king's chaplain; his appointment at Paris had been accompanied by promotion to the see of Hereford, and before he returned to take possession he was translated to the bishopric of London (October 1539).
Hitherto Bonner had been known as a somewhat coarse and unscrupulous tool of Cromwell, a sort of ecclesiastical Wriothesley, He is not known to have protested against any of the changes effected by his masters; he professed to be no theologian, and was wont, when asked theological questions, to refer his interrogators to the divines. He had graduated in law, and not in theology. There was nothing in the Reformation to appeal to him, except the repudiation of papal control; and he was one of those numerous Englishmen whose views were faithfully reflected in the Six Articles. He became a staunch Conservative, and, apart from his embassy to the emperor in 1524-1543, was mainly occupied during the last years of Henry's reign in brandishing the "whip with six strings."
The accession of Edward VI opened a fresh and more creditable chapter in Bonner's career. Like Gardiner, he could hardly repudiate that royal supremacy, in the establishment of which he had been so active an agent; but he began to doubt that supremacy when he saw to what uses it could be put by a Protestant council, and either he or Gardiner evolved the theory that the royal supremacy was in abeyance during a royal minority. The ground was skilfully chosen, but it was not legally nor constitutionally tenable. Both he and Gardiner had in fact sought fresh licences to exercise their ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the young king; and, if he was supreme enough to confer jurisdiction, he was supreme enough to issue the injunctions and order the visitation to which Bonner objected. Moreover, if a minority involved an abeyance of the royal supremacy in the ecclesiastical sphere, it must do the same in the temporal sphere, and there could be nothing but anarchy. It was on this question that Bonner came into conflict with Edward's government. He resisted the visitation of August 1547, and was committed to the Fleet; but he withdrew his opposition, and was released in time to take an active part against the government in the parliament of November 1547. In the next session, November 1548-March 1549, he was a leading opponent of the first Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. When these became law, he neglected to enforce them, and on the 1st of September 1549 he was required by the council to maintain at St Paul's Cross that the royal authority was as great as if the king were forty years of age. He failed to comply, and after a seven days' trial he was deprived of his bishopric by an ecclesiastical court over which Cranmer presided, and was sent to the Marshalsea. The fall of Somerset in the following month raised Bonner's hopes, and he appealed from Cranmer to the council. After a struggle the Protestant faction gained the upper hand, and on the 7th of February 1550 Bonner's deprivation was confirmed by the council sitting in the Star Chamber, and he was further condemned to perpetual imprisonment.
He was released by Mary's accession, and was at once restored to his see, his deprivation being regarded as invalid and Ridley as an intruder. He vigorously restored Roman Catholicism in his diocese, made no difficulty about submitting to the papal jurisdiction which he had forsworn, and in 1555 began the persecution to which he owes his fame. His apologists explain that his action was merely "official," but Bonner was one of those who brought it to pass that the condemnation of heretics to the fire should be part of his ordinary official duties. The enforcement of the first Book of Common Prayer had also been part of his official duties; and the fact that Bonner made no such protest against the burning of heretics as he had done in the former case shows that he found it the more congenial duty. Tunstal was as good a Catholic as Bonner; he left a different repute behind him, a clear enough indication of a difference in their deeds.
On the other hand, Bonner did not go out of his way to persecute; many of his victims were forced upon him by the council, which sometimes thought that he had not been severe enough (see _Acts of the P.C. 1554-1556_, pp. 115, 139; _1556-1558_, pp. 18, 19, 216, 276). So completely had the state dominated the church that religious persecutions had become state persecutions, and Bonner was acting as an ecclesiastical sheriff in the most refractory district of the realm. Even Foxe records instances in which Bonner failed to persecute. But he had no mercy for a fallen foe; and he is seen at his worst in his brutal jeers at Cranmer, when he was entrusted with the duty of degrading his former chief. It is a more remarkable fact that, in spite of his prominence, neither Henry VIII. nor Mary should ever have admitted him to the privy council. He seems to have been regarded by his own party as a useful instrument, especially in disagreeable work, rather than as a desirable colleague.
On her accession Elizabeth refused to allow him to kiss her hand; but he sat and voted in the parliament and convocation of 1559. In May he refused to take the oath of supremacy, acquiring like his colleagues consistency with old age. He was sent to the Marshalsea, and a few years later was indicted on a charge of praemunire on refusing the oath when tendered him by his diocesan, Bishop Horne of Winchester. He challenged the legality of Horne's consecration, and a special act of parliament was passed to meet the point, while the charge against Bonner was withdrawn. He died in the Marshalsea on the 5th of September 1569, and was buried in St George's, Southwark, at midnight to avoid the risk of a hostile demonstration.
See _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._ vols. iv.-xx.; _Acts of the Privy Council_ (1542-1569); _Lords' Journals_, vol. i.; Wilkins' _Concilia_; Foxe's _Acts and Monuments_, ed. Townsend; Burnet, ed. Pocock; Strype's Works; Gough's _Index to Parker Soc. Publ._; S.R. Maitland's _Essays on the Ref._; Froude's and R.W. Dixon's _Histories_; Pollard's _Cranmer_ and _England under Somerset_; other authorities cited in _Dict. Nat. Biogr_. (A. F. P.)
BONNET, CHARLES (1720-1793), Swiss naturalist and philosophical writer, was born at Geneva on the 13th of March 1720, of a French family driven into Switzerland by the religious persecution in the 16th century. He made law his profession, but his favourite pursuit was the study of natural science. The account of the ant-lion in N.A. Pluche's _Spectacle de la nature_, which he read in his sixteenth year, turned his attention to insect life. He procured R.A.F. de Reaumur's work on insects, and with the help of live specimens succeeded in adding many observations to those of Reaumur and Pluche. In 1740 Bonnet communicated to the academy of sciences a paper containing a series of experiments establishing what is now termed parthenogenesis in _aphides_ or tree-lice, which obtained for him the honour of being admitted a corresponding member of the academy. In 1741 he began to study reproduction by fusion and the regeneration of lost parts in the freshwater hydra and other animals; and in the following year he discovered that the respiration of caterpillars and butterflies is performed by pores, to which the name of _stigmata_ has since been given. In 1743 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society; and in the same year he became a doctor of laws--his last
## act in connexion with a profession which had ever been distasteful to
him.
His first published work appeared in 1745, entitled _Traite d'insectologie_, in which were collected his various discoveries regarding insects, along with a preface on the development of germs and the scale of organized beings. Botany, particularly the leaves of plants, next attracted his attention; and after several years of diligent study, rendered irksome by the increasing weakness of his eyesight, he published in 1754 one of the most original and interesting of his works, _Recherches sur l'usage des feuilles dans les plantes_; in which among other things he advances many considerations tending to show (as has quite recently been done by Francis Darwin) that plants are endowed with powers of sensation and discernment. But Bonnet's eyesight, which threatened to fail altogether, caused him to turn to philosophy. In 1754 his _Essai de psychologie_ was published anonymously in London. This was followed by the _Essai analytique sur les facultes de l'ame_ (Copenhagen, 1760), in which he develops his views regarding the physiological conditions of mental activity. He returned to physical science, but to the speculative side of it, in his _Considerations sur les corps organises_ (Amsterdam, 1762), designed to refute the theory of epigenesis, and to explain and defend the doctrine of pre-existent germs. In his _Contemplation de la nature_ (Amsterdam, 1764-1765; translated into Italian, German, English and Dutch), one of his most popular and delightful works, he sets forth, in eloquent language, the theory that all the beings in nature form a gradual scale rising from lowest to highest, without any break in its continuity. His last important work was the _Palingenesie philosophique_ (Geneva, 1769-1770); in it he treats of the past and future of living beings, and supports the idea of the survival of all animals, and the perfecting of their faculties in a future state.
Bonnet's life was uneventful. He seems never to have left Switzerland, nor does he appear to have taken any part in public affairs except for the period between 1752 and 1768, during which he was a member of the council of the republic. The last twenty five years of his life he spent quietly in the country, at Genthod, near Geneva, where he died after a long and painful illness on the 20th of May 1793. His wife was a lady of the family of De la Rive.
They had no children, but Madame Bonnet's nephew, the celebrated H.B. de Saussure, was brought up as their son.
Bonnet's philosophical system may be outlined as follows. Man is a compound of two distinct substances, mind and body, the one immaterial and the other material. All knowledge originates in sensations; sensations follow (whether as physical effects or merely as sequents Bonnet will not say) vibrations in the nerves appropriate to each; and lastly, the nerves are made to vibrate by external physical stimulus. A nerve once set in motion by a particular object tends to reproduce that motion; so that when it a second time receives an impression from the same object it vibrates with less resistance. The sensation accompanying this increased flexibility in the nerve is, according to Bonnet, the condition of memory. When reflection--that is, the active element in mind--is applied to the acquisition and combination of sensations, those abstract ideas are formed which, though generally distinguished from, are thus merely sensations in combination only. That which puts the mind into activity is pleasure or pain; happiness is the end of human existence. Bonnet's metaphysical theory is based on two principles borrowed from Leibnitz--first, that there are not successive acts of creation, but that the universe is completed by the single original act of the divine will, and thereafter moves on by its own inherent force; and secondly, that there is no break in the continuity of existence. The divine Being originally created a multitude of germs in a graduated scale, each with an inherent power of self-development. At every successive step in the progress of the universe, these germs, as progressively modified, advance nearer to perfection; if some advanced and others did not there would be a gap in the continuity of the chain. Thus not man only but all other forms of existence are immortal. Nor is man's mind alone immortal; his body also will pass into the higher stage, not, indeed, the body he now possesses, but a finer one of which the germ at present exists within him. It is impossible, however, to reach absolute perfection, because the distance is infinite. In this final proposition Bonnet violates his own principle of continuity, by postulating an interval between the highest created being and the Divine. It is also difficult to understand whether the constant advance to perfection is performed by each individual, or only by each race of beings as a whole. There seems, in fact, to be an oscillation between two distinct but analogous doctrines--that of the constantly increasing advancement of the individual in future stages of existence, and that of the constantly increasing advancement of the race as a whole according to the successive evolutions of the globe.
Bonnet's complete works appeared at Neuchatel in 1779-1783, partly revised by himself. An English translation of certain portions of the _Palingenesie philosophique_ was published in 1787, under the title, _Philosophical and Critical Inquiries concerning Christianity_. See also A. Lemoine, _Charles Bonnet_ (Paris, 1850); the duc de Caraman, _Charles Bonnet, philosophe et naturaliste_ (Paris, 1859); Max Offner, _Die Psychologie C. B._ (Leipzig, 1893); Joh. Speck, in _Arch. f. Gesch. d. Philos._ x. (1897), xi. (1897), pp. 58 foll., xi. (1898) pp. 1-211; J. Trembley, _Vie privee et litteraire de C. B._ (Bern, 1794).
BONNET (from Lat. _bonetum_, a kind of stuff, then the cap made of this stuff), originally a soft cap or covering for the head, the common term in English till the end of the 17th century; this sense survives in Scotland, especially as applied to the cap known as a "glengarry." The "bonnet" of a ship's sail now means an additional piece laced on to the bottom, but it seems to have formerly meant a piece laced to the top, the term "to vail the bonnet" being found at the beginning of the 16th century to mean "strike sail" (from the Fr. _avaler_), to let down. In modern times "bonnet" has come to be used of a type of head-covering for women, differentiated from "hat" by fitting closely to the head and often having no brim, but varying considerably in shape according to the period and fashion. The term, by a natural extension, is also applied to certain protective devices, as in a steam-engine or safety-lamp, or in slang use to a gambler's accomplice, a decoy.